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TeamsAugust 25, 20264 min read

Handing social media to somebody else

The handover fails in the same places every time: access, approval, and what happens on the day nobody is available.

The work is easy to describe and hard to hand over, because most of it lives in a head — who we are, what we would never say, whose photograph that is.

Access, without a shared password

Roles, not credentials. Every network has them, and they let you remove one person without changing anything for everyone else. Sharing a login is how a business ends up locked out of its own account by somebody who left in March.

Approval, as a state and not a chat

The post has a state: written, approved, scheduled. Anything else — screenshots by email, a voice note of changes, somebody retyping the approved version — produces a version that nobody has actually read in the form it goes out in.

WrittenApprovedPublished
Three states, one direction. Everything else is a conversation pretending to be a process.

What to write down before they start

  • The voice page — three adjectives, the words you do not use, examples
  • What needs approval and what does not
  • Who answers a complaint, and how fast
  • What to do when something breaks and nobody replies

Give the last one a real answer. “Wait for me” fails on the one weekend it matters, and the person you hired will make the decision anyway — better it is one you agreed on.

Stop watching the clock. Start drifting.

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